‘Extraordinary’ diseases as news in the relationship of occurrences: linguistic structures and discursive strategies

Abstract

This study aims at undertaking a historical analysis of the news coverage of the disease in the past with the purpose of establishing how the process of converting a raw fact into a news event manifests, in its evolution, a particular discursive construction about health and disease, embodied in language strategies that vary from one period to another. To this end, we have selected a corpus of relations of events belonging to the seventeenth century from the old Fund of the University of Seville, which address the unique nature of a disease, focusing on the detailed description of the symptoms. The linguistic structures that appear in the texts constituting the corpus are determined by the discursive purpose that these fold: to relate an unusual event outside the normal daily life with an exemplary social objective.